copy challenge

One of the first, and most important, lessons I’ve picked up about copywriting is “You have to understand your market.”

It all starts with that. If you need to know how to do anything, the answer is in the market.

Many many high profile copywriters preach this mantra.

And it applies to this challenge too.

My first copy challenge task for the day is working on coming up with a big idea. In many ways that’s a fancy way of saying “research”.

But it’s specific research for a specific market.

In this challenge, I decided to focus on financial. Not because it pays best… but because it’s one of the most challenging to write for. It’s highly research based. The customers tend to be educated and sophisticated.

And it’s competitive.

I believe if you want to get good at something, you have to go up against the best. Doing that will push you further (whether you succeed or not) than going up against an average Joe.

So it comes back to the market.

How can you learn your market inside and out, better than anyone else? One of the easiest ways is to be in your market. But I’m not a 60 year old conservative white male (yet).

The next best step is going to be to talk to people in that market.

You should literally make a list of people you know and seek to increase it every day. And then talk to them. Get to know them. Make sure you like them.

This is after all what you’re signing up for as a copywriter. You’re supposed to want to help these people be better off in some way.

The products you’re going to be selling in any market are supposed to make them healthier, wealthier, or wiser.

If you don’t like this group and are just in it for the money, you’re going to have a hard time being successful in the long run.

That’s all pretty much just common sense though.

Here’s another tip I’ve come across even as I’m just getting my feet wet in this project. Specialize more than you think you need to.

I suspect this is the same with any field you want to get into. But in financial, there are so many different ways to make money that as a new copywriter, if you dip your toe in all of them you might get good exposure, but you won’t get good.

To get good, you need to go deeper. So do you want to write about stock investing (or even specific types of stocks)? Or do you want to talk about options and option strategies? Maybe you want to talk FinTech, Real Estate, or Forex?

My point here is that the market itself is going to be slightly different for each of these areas. Risk tolerances and perspectives are going to differ.

If you try to go research your market but you’re too broad, you may miss the mark in a lot of ways. You also may not be able to dive as deep as you want to because as you to something like risk, the market starts to splinter based on what they want to do.

Alright, I’m pretty long winded today and my time is up for writing this morning. Time to get to work.

If you want more information on the challenge and some resources I’m using to get to know my market of choice, subscribe to my email list.

Until tomorrow.

P.S. I’m going to drop the “Copywriting Challenge” from these post headers starting tomorrow because it’s starting to feel really redundant.

I’ll still categorize the posts that talk specifically about my activity with this challenge.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, this isn’t as much about some 30 day challenge to me as building the proper habits to become a good great copywriter.

It’s Wednesday September 2nd. Do you know where your children are?

What do you even call that? A pop culture reference? Anyway…

I had a realization yesterday about the Copywriting Challenge that I’m doing for myself.

If you’re an experienced copywriter and you probably see it from a mile away. The whole idea that you can ‘learn to be a copywriter’ as a challenge doesn’t really make sense.

I think this challenge is suited for more specific hurdles you come across within copywriting. What I’ve set up seems more like something I need to continue… forever. Copywriter habits, if you will.

So this daily routine of reading, writing, reverse engineering, copywork. These things aren’t something I want to mentally tell myself that I’m done after 30 days.. or three months.

So I am reframing the challenge not to become a good copywriter, but to develop a good copywriters daily habits. The scope of that project doesn’t take as long, but it builds the foundation I need to be really good at this.

So this challenge is going to be learning how to incorporate 5 key activities into my day reliably.

The five things are:

1. Research (aka developing a big idea)
2. Reverse engineer a successful promo
3. Read / study a copywriting book from a respected copywriter
4. Write at least a page of copy (or spend at least an hour writing copy)
5. Copywork

So my goal for today is to try and get those done. The goal is to build the habits needed to become good at copywriting.

Did I leave anything off the list? Leave a comment below and let me know.

If you’d like more details on the five key aspects of the challenge, make sure to join the mailing list.

Until tomorrow.

Have you ever sat staring at a page trying to find something to write? I believe it’s something you can train yourself out of. But I also think that it may have to do with the time of day you’re trying to write.

In Daniel Pink’s book “When”, he talks about a person’s chronotype – basically are you a morning person or a night owl.

Now for the most part, we have an idea what we are. My wife is definitely not a morning person, but I am. I get up ready to go in the morning. She sometimes doesn’t even get up in the morning…

But what I found most interesting was how he breaks the waking time of your day into three different buckets. The Peak, Trough, and Rebound.

To help optimize your output in a day, he says certain tasks need aligned with their respective bucket of time.

Let’s say you have you have a blog post to write. Should you be working on it earlier in the day or later in the day? Well it partly depends on your chronotype. If you’re a morning person, you actually want to do your creative, idea generating work in the evenings.

That sounds somewhat counterintuitive to me. (And probably means I should be updating my blog with posts in the evening instead of first thing in the morning…)

As I learned more about learning, it starts to seem more obvious though. Creative work relies on making new connections between ideas. That’s a task for diffuse thinking (when your mind wanders).

But for most of us, that means we should be doing the research and editing of our thoughts in the morning.

Now you may be a night owl. You’ll just have to check your energy levels to see how you should be structuring your day.

I have time set aside in my schedule for this project in both the morning and evening.

Sign up for my email list if you’d like more information on how I’m structuring my day to get through this challenge.

Time to get some work in. Until tomorrow.

It’s the last day in August. Now is the perfect time to wrap up the planning and do a week long trial run.

I’ve go on order all the books on Halbert’s list as a classical approach.

Scientific Advertising is first up and the target of the trial run. I’ve listened to this book on audible three times already, but I’m going to apply principles of Ultralearning to digest the book in much greater detail.

Since the first week needs to also produce something, I’m also going to be hand-copying the letters in Halbert’s list.

To pull in the modern, I’m going to use AWAI’s list of financial controls. I’ll mix in both modern and some of the older financial controls.

One area where I’m going to tweak for myself is having one promotion comped up and typeset. I’ve got some ideas about incorporating that in a digital area. But I’m also going to reverse engineer one of the controls for myself so I can get better at deconstructing the letters.

As I’m re-reading and taking notes, I’m planning on doing the deep dive into the books. In particular, I want to note concepts, facts, and procedures as I go.

Alongside this process, I spend time each day writing at least one page of copy. Not copying – writing. It’s just a page, so I think doing some shortform copy such as emails might be a good way to incorporate that practice.

This blog is more of a journal for myself, so I’m not counting it. I’m also strictly limiting myself to how much time I spend writing and editing on it each day. It’s primarily for me to develop the habit of not having writers block.

Happy Sunday fellow Learnatics.

Yesterday I further narrowed where I’m going to focus the challenge and isolated some specifics on How I want t nail down the challenge.

Some of what I determined will be obvious. For example this plan will have me writing A LOT.

Other strategies I came across don’t show up in other trainings nearly as often.

An example of this would be learning the flow of a control. Typically the recommendations to learn this go as far as just marking up the parts of a control.

However, once I do that I’m going to write out each section on notecards. Then I can shuffle them and practice putting the pieces back together from memory, not just looking at the flow.

This will hammer in the free recall and understanding of why things flow the way they do.

I got that tip from a strategy Benjamin Franklin used to become good at writing articles. He did pretty well for himself. (hah)

That being said. I’ve got a lot more work to do. I keep coming across the same material over and over now regarding the strategy.

I’ve narrowed the scope of my original goal quite a bit. So I don’t want to spend too much time here in analysis. I will come back to it as needed as I progress.

For more details about exactly how I’m going to tackle some of the key skills for this project, join my email list. You can find it on the sidebar. I’m going to keep moving on here. Talk to you tomorrow.